Photoresponsive Fiber Array: Toward Mimicking the Collective Motion of Cilia for Transport Applications

Remote transport of material is an utmost useful, but challenging, property expanding the design possibilities of many applications such as microfluidics or robotics where species can be carried without interfering with its environment. Nature has solved the problem of transport in e.g., the respiratory system by a concerted motion of cilia. This study addresses a new method to fabricate an array of small parallel fibers acting as cilia placed side by side on a substrate. The fibers consist of a crosslinked liquid crystal main chain polymer functionalized with coreactant azobenzene molecules. The fibers bend toward a light source in a concerted manner. When placed in a liquid, the cooperative bending motion of the fibers creates a flow able to efficiently carry objects. The proposed fabrication process of the fibers is scalable to large area and requires an optimized rheology which is achieved by converting low molecular weight reactive liquid crystal acrylate monomers to oligomers using a multiplication of the monomeric units by the Michael addition reaction with dithiol. The oligomer properties and the elasticity of the fibers are adjusted by changing the thiol spacer leading to optimized manufacturing and maximized optical response.     

Tunable Nanoparticle and Cell Assembly Using Combined Self‐Powered Microfluidics and Microcontact Printing

The combination of cell microenvironment control and real‐time monitoring of cell signaling events can provide key biological information. Through precise multipatterning of gold nanoparticles (GNPs) around cells, sensing and actuating elements can be introduced in the cells' microenviroment, providing a powerful substrate for cell studies. In this work, a combination of techniques are implemented to engineer complex substrates for cell studies. Alternating GNPs and bioactive areas are created with micrometer separation by means of a combination of vacumm soft‐lithography of GNPs and protein microcontract printing. Instead of conventional microfluidics that need syringe pumps to flow liquid in the microchannels, degas driven flow is used to fill dead‐end channels with GNP solutions, rendering the fabrication process straightforward and accessible. This new combined technique is called Printing and Vacuum lithography (PnV lithography). By using different GNPs with various organic coating ligands, different macroscale patterns are obtained, such as wires, supercrystals, and uniformly spread nanoparticle layers that can find different applications depending on the need of the user. The application of the system is tested to pattern a range of mammalian cell lines and obtain readouts on cell viability, cell morphology, and the presence of cell adhesive proteins.     

Gas Pickering Emulsion Templated Hollow Carbon for High Rate Performance Lithium Sulfur Batteries

A CO₂ in water nanoparticle stabilized Pickering emulsion is used to template micrometer sized hollow porous nitrogen doped carbon particles for high rate performance lithium sulfur battery. For the first time, nanoparticles serve the dual role of an emulsion stabilizer and a pore template for the shell, directly utilizing in situ generated CO₂ bubbles as template for the core. The minimalistic nature of this method does not require expensive surfactants or additional core templates. Upon polymerization of melamine formaldehyde onto CO₂, a robust polymer/silica composite shell is formed and transformed into a porous shell upon washing. The micrometer‐sized hollow morphology in combination with its nitrogen rich porous shell demonstrates impressive rate capabilities of 670 and 500 mAh g^?1 even at a high rate of 7C and 9C, respectively. This material also possesses excellent cycle durability, exhibiting a low capacity decay of 0.088%/cycle over 300 cycles. Measurement of the shuttle current and impedance provides interesting insight into the polysulfide mass transfer mechanism of hollow structured sulfur hosts.     

OFDMA femtocells: a roadmap on interference avoidance - [topics in radio communications]

OFDMA femtocells have been pointed out by the industry as a good solution not only to overcome the indoor coverage problem but also to deal with the growth of traffic within macrocells. However, the deployment of a new femtocell layer may have an undesired impact on the performance of the macrocell layer. The allocation of spectrum resources and the avoidance of electromagnetic interference are some of the more urgent challenges that operators face before femtocells become widely deployed. In this article a coverage and interference analysis based on a realistic OFDMA macro/femtocell scenario is provided, as well as some guidelines on how the spectrum allocation and interference mitigation problems can be approached in these networks. Special attention is paid to the use of self-configuration and self-optimization techniques for the avoidance of interference.     

Accuracy of the zero crossings of the second directional derivative as an edge detector

In this paper the accuracy of the second directional derivative edge detector is analyzed, based on a number of idealized edge models. The results are compared with those for the Laplacian edge detector. Errors are shown to be small under a number of conditions. These conditions are less severe for the second directional derivative than for the Laplacian edge detector. Spurious or phantom edges can be removed by checking the sign of the third directional derivative, though this is not enough to remove all large errors. Indeed, it is also shown that large errors will be obtained if no threshold is set on the magnitude of a third order derivative.This work was supported by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (NFWO).     

The gamma-filter-a new class of adaptive IIR filters withrestricted feedback

Generalized feedforward filters, a class of adaptive filters that combines attractive properties of finite impulse response (FIR) filters with some of the power of infinite impulse response (IIR) filters, are described. A particular case, the gamma filter, generalizes Widrow's adaptive transversal filter (adaline) to an infinite impulse response filter. Yet, the stability condition for the gamma filter is trivial, and LMS adaptation is of the same computational complexity as the conventional transversal filter structure. Preliminary results indicate that the gamma filter is more efficient than the adaptive transversal filter. The authors extend the Wiener-Kopf equation to the gamma filter and develop some analysis tools     

Reflectance pulse oximetry measurements from the retinal fundus

Conventional transmission pulse oximetry is a noninvasive technique for the continuous monitoring of arterial oxygen saturation (SaO₂) from peripheral vascular beds such as the finger tip or earlobe. It is proposed to exploit the unique transparency of the ocular media to make reflectance pulse oximetry measurements on the retinal fundus. This technique potentially offers significant advantages over conventional pulse oximetry, primarily in the ability to monitor cerebral, as opposed to peripheral, oxygen saturation. An in vitro system has been developed to simulate the retinal circulation and ocular optics. This system consists of a flexible cuvette located in a model eye and an extracorporeal blood circuit to simulate arterial blood flow. The system was used to investigate the relationship between SaO₂ and the R/IR ratio in reflectance pulse oximetry. To enable in vivo measurements to be made, a standard haptic contact lens was modified to hold the pulse oximeter probe in front of the pupil. In a preliminary study, the lens was fitted to an awake volunteer and cardiac-synchronous signals were detected by the retinal pulse oximeter     

Four state binary QAM trellis code better than known codes

Presents a new one-memory quaternary four-state trellis code, and its four-state binary equivalent code based on a QAM constellation which is 0.52 dB better than the four-state Ungerboeck code.<>     

Correlation between shielding effectiveness measurements andalternative methods for the characterization of shielding materials

The correlation between different methods for the characterization of shielding materials is discussed. It is found that a good agreement is obtained using basic methods, such as a four-point resistance measurement, or standard shielding effectiveness methods and using other methods allowing a quick control in the field during injection moulding process     

Efficient computer analysis of ideal switched-capacitor circuits using matrix compaction techniques

In this paper we describe how three simple observations can be used in order to obtain an efficient algorithm for the computer analysis of ideal switched-capacitor circuits. the resulting algorithm is linear in the number of phases. the first observation uses the structure of the r-domain MNA-matrix to come up with a new LU-decomposition scheme which is gradual per timeslot. the second observation allows a great reduction in size of the z-domain MNA-matrix by a matrix compaction algorithm which also operates gradually per timeslot and which can be interleaved with the first gradual LU-decomposition process. This leads to a small matrix which can then be used for a time- and direct frequency-domain analysis. Third, the computations of transfer functions, aliasing functions and sensitivities can be optimized by applying appropriate excitations and making appropriate combinations of the terms in the expressions. These algorithms have been implemented in the SC-analysis program DIANA.SC. the usefulness and efficiency of the program is then illustrated with some examples.